Paul slighted by the ‘neoconservative’ GOP

Ron Paul says the legions of newcomers his presidential campaign brought to the Republican Party are getting the cold shoulder from John McCain and from the party.

The Texas congressman says neither he nor his supporters have heard from Mr. McCain or Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan since March 4, when the Arizona senator accumulated enough delegates to clinch the party’s presidential nomination.

“I don’t think they want them,” Mr. Paul told The Washington Times, adding that indifference doesn’t surprise him because the party’s establishment has deserted traditional conservative principles for big government and foreign intervention.

“We don’t agree with them,” he says. “We agree with the Old Right, and they’re the New Right, which is ‘The Wrong,’ [because] the New Right has morphed into neoconservative.”

Many of his 800,000 presidential nomination votes were from newcomers to the Republican Party — the kind of dedicated small-donor volunteers the party needs, he says.

Mr. Duncan says he informed Mr. Paul that Mr. McCain had gone over the top on delegates but did not discuss how the party might hold onto Mr. Paul’s supporters — and their potential future financial contributions.

Only Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, has bothered to tell Mr. Paul that his supporters are welcome, and valued, in the party. Mr. Cole, an evangelical Christian who says he too once felt unwelcome in the party, confirmed in a separate interview that he wants to see Mr. Paul’s supporters stay and help expand the party’s ranks.

Mr. McCain hasn’t approached Mr. Paul’s voters because Mr. Paul has not called to say he is ending his run, says McCain campaign senior adviser Charles Black.

Mr. Paul says that neoconservatives who hijacked the Republicans extol what he most abhors: the belief that government is part of the solution, not the problem, and that America’s inherent beneficence entitles it to force selected other nations to make themselves over in America’s image.

That’s partly the reason why, even though Mr. McCain has crossed the finish line of this marathon, Mr. Paul will keep running in states with upcoming primaries.

He wants to see whether the surprisingly successful appeal of his limited-government message represents the beginning of a “revolution” within the Republican Party similar to the one that began swelling the party’s ranks with church-going newcomers 30 years ago.

“I am doing a few more things, in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, maybe Idaho,” he says. “I’m curious right now to see how the rallies go. Whether they fade off now — just see what happens.”

He thinks he knows why Sen. Barack Obama raised more money and won more Democratic delegates than Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and why Mr. McCain ended up at the top of the Republican heap, while Mr. Paul won no primaries and came away with only 42 delegates.

“We didn’t have $100 million and the support of the evening news,” he says. “At a rally in Philadelphia, we had 5,000 people. If Obama had it, he’d have been on the front page of the New York Times.”

He estimates his e-mail list of committed supporters alone would account for about 10 percent of the Republican electorate and could move mountains, if they choose to stay in the party and work to change it the way evangelicals and Catholics changed it, beginning in the Ronald Reagan era.

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